By Paul Homewood
Someone tipped me off about this website, which has a lot of useful data about renewable energy, both in the UK and Europe:
https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
It is worthwhile playing around with it, but one useful feature is a table of output, capacity factors etc for each offshore installation in the UK. Currently the rolling 12-month average capacity loading is 40.6%.
What I found particularly useful i8s this chart:
It shows the time distribution of capacity loads, both for individual wind farms and overall.
So for instance, the load factor was 36.3% or more for 50% of the time, ie the median. (This arguably is a more important measure than the average load).
The curve for all windfarms is for the last five years.
If we look at extremes, we find that load is below 20% for 31% of the time, in other words below half of the average.
At the other end, output is above 80% for 12% of the time.
In other words, loading is either extremely high or extremely low for 43% of the year. This gives the lie to claims that wind power is reliable most of the time, and that output is smoothed because of the widespread geographic distribution – in other words, that the wind always blows somewhere!
In particular, it is commonly claimed that winds at sea are much less volatile than over land.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
May 17, 2020 at 05:33AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 